11 ms·

Love this comment left on the post by Peter Shor (of Shor's algorithm--the algorithm that kicked off the quantum computing frenzy). I assume it's him and not an

Love this comment left on the post by Peter Shor (of Shor's algorithm--the algorithm that kicked off the quantum computing frenzy). I assume it's him and not an imposter. "It's not just that scientists don't want to move their butts, although that's undoubtedly part of it. It's also that they can't. In today's university funding system, you need grants (well, maybe you don't truly need them once you have tenure, but they're very nice to have). So who decides which people get the grants? It's their peers, who are all working on exactly the same things that everybody is working on. And if you submit a proposal that says "I'm going to go off and work on this crazy idea, and maybe there's a one in a thousand chance that I'll discover some of the secrets of the universe, and a 99.9% chance that I'll come up with bubkes," you get turned down. But if a thousand really smart people did this, maybe we'd actually have a chance of making some progress. (Assuming they really did have promising crazy ideas, and weren't abusing the system. Of course, what would actually happen is that the new system would be abused and we wouldn't be any better off than we are now.) So the only advice I have is that more physicists need to not worry about grants, and go hide in their attics and work on new and crazy theories, the way Andrew Wiles worked on Fermat's Last Theorem." (new comment right below) "Let me make an addendum to my previous comment, that I was too modest to put into it. This is roughly how I discovered the quantum factoring algorithm. I didn't tell anybody I was working on it until I had figured it out. And although it didn't take years of solitary toil in my attic (the way that Fermat's Last Theorem did), I thought about it on and off for maybe a year, and worked on it moderately hard for a month or two when I saw that it actually might work. So, people, go hide in your attics!"

gbumakefan 8y ago
Except you can’t just go hide in your attic. Everyone is more risk averse than ever as the cost of housing, healthcare, and education relentlessly increase faster than wages.
- nixpulvis 8y ago
  Reminds me a bit of the expression "desperate times call for desperate measures".
- EGreg 8y ago
  This is one of the best arguments for UBI. Imagine how much humanity would innovate in science, open source and other public gift economies if everyone didn’t have to worry how they will eat and pay rent next month.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    How about reducing the generally accepted working hours to something like 24 hrs/week? 40 is pretty arbitrary so we could arbitrarily set a lower number. That would free up a lot of creativity.
  - pdonis 8y ago
    The argument you are making assumes two things that strike me as highly implausible: (1) That enough people would use their new free time to innovate instead of just watching TV or playing World of Warcraft or something like that. (2) That enough people would still choose to do the unpleasant but necessary tasks that provide the resources needed for everyone to eat, have housing, etc. Not to mention all the other stuff people seem to want.
    - dv_dt 8y ago
      Right now a fairly tight circle of people decide for others how to spend vast amounts of time. It's not even very efficient as many jobs carry bullshit hours requirements. So after increasing free time by a large amount, a very small number of people start choosing different areas to innovate in, it still ends up as a large growth area for innovation, or social interaction, or whatever humans value individually instead of what old line accounting values.
      - pdonis 8y ago
        I don't dispute that our current system is inefficient. But the proposed change under discussion (universal basic income) does not just mean "increasing free time by a large amount" while keeping everything else the same. It means increasing free time by a large amount while removing the need for anyone to do productive work. It's the latter that I see as problematic, not the former. What would a world where we did the former but not the latter look like? It would be something like everyone having to be, at least in some measure, an entrepreneur--everyone would be their own small business, having to figure out what product or service to sell to others in order to make a living, and having to decide for themselves what use of their time would best serve that goal. That might well, in the long run (i.e., after all the upheaval caused by people who were used to having someone else define their business objectives, now having to do it themselves, has died down), be a big improvement over what we have now. But the key incentive of having to make a living is still there.
- syncsynchalt 8y ago
  Human productivity is at its highest point in human history, so one can't help but wonder why we must all work harder than our ancestors to exist.
  - fokov 8y ago
    Because they realized they were in this together, unionized, not just demanded but fought for more rights and a better life balance. Since the baby-boomers more women entered the work force and used their "extra" income to buy things. That lead to inflation of those assets - especially housing. Now people continue to push down labor rights so they make even less than before. I'm with you though, I find this to be extremely frustrating.
  - InclinedPlane 8y ago
    It's almost as though much of that productivity on an individual level is not making it back to those individuals, and going somewhere else, perhaps to others.
  - trophycase 8y ago
    And more economically useless work is done than ever before by an enormous margin (advertising, CGI, video games, cosmetics, PR, social media addiction, etc.). Just briefly think about how many people produce nothing of real value (i.e. value that would actually reduce housing, food, and medical costs) and how many are simply trying to redistribute the demand of the general population so they can get theirs. Basically, there are fewer economic "sources" than ever and more "sinks" than ever.
    - vorg 8y ago
      > many people produce nothing of real value (i.e. value that would actually reduce housing, food, and medical costs) Worse still, many people do work that exists for the purpose of raising housing, food, and medical costs.
  - FabHK 8y ago
    Keynes famously predicted 88 years ago [1] that "the economic problem" would be solved 100 years thence (hence in 12 years), and assumed that people would only need to work 15 hours a week. But back then already he pointed out two issues: * what will people do with their free time? "It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing!" He asked whether there might be a "general 'nervous breakdown'" of people "who cannot find it sufficiently amusing [...] to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing." * While most of our needs would easily be fulfilled, he noted a second class of needs, jostling for relative status, that might never be: there are two classes, "needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they." And he got somewhat overly optimistic then maybe: "The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth – unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them." Seems to me the massive inequality and concomitant struggle for relative status keeps most everyone working like crazy, even though we have many times more than what people had a century ago. [1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/... EDIT to add: Keynes biographer Lord Skidelsky has a book about it, How much is enough?: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/29/how-much-is-enough-skidelsky-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/29/how-much-is-en...
TremendousJudge 8y ago
And Einstein didn't write his breakthrough papers while employed at a university either
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  He had an easy job at the patent office so he had time and energy to work on other things.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Aperson4321 8y ago
    And boredom and desperation. One thing is to have the rare talent and opportunity, another is to actually truly go for it. Most people lack the daring and rebelliousness to think that they can prove that all of humanity in all of history have misunderstood something truly fundamental.
fjuerfilis 8y ago
Sigh, so true. Heartening that Shor has the same thoughts about the grant system that I do. I don't have quite the same critical perspective as the blogger, but I think there's a certain misguided attitude underlying the phenomena observed by Shor. Yesterday or the day before I was listening to the radio and someone with a physics background was talking about something (I think quantum entanglement) and started asserting that physics has basically figured out almost everything. This is probably a somewhat unfair paraphrase, but not too unfair. What irritated me about it was the assumption that, if most of your predictions are correct, your model is almost entirely correct, and just needs to be tweaked a bit. This is certainly true some of the time, but sometimes those little empirical cracks are what brings down a major paradigm, and leads to another one, one that has the same predictions as in 99% of the cases, but in the other 1% has totally different predictions with very different implications. This carries over to grant funding, etc. in that the prevailing community often assumes that what they're doing is fine, and all that's left are these little empirical tweaks. That's certainly helpful some of the time, but it seems to dominate too much. Academics needs to leave more room for people to fail at high rates with good ideas, to increase those small percent of times they succeed wildly.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  >> What irritated me about it was the assumption that, if most of your predictions are correct, your model is almost entirely correct, and just needs to be tweaked a bit. Haha, no. We wish. Epicycles worked very well and were highly accurate, because, as Fourier analysis later showed, any smooth curve can be approximated to arbitrary accuracy with a sufficient number of epicycles. However, they fell out of favour with the discovery that planetary motions were largely elliptical from a heliocentric frame of reference, which led to the discovery that gravity obeying a simple inverse square law could better explain all planetary motions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle A theory can explain observations even perfectly well and still be wrong- because the frame of reference is wrong. The worse thing is that you can't figure that out until you've figured out what the correct frame of reference is, and looked at your obsrevations in a new light.
  - 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dv_dt 8y ago
It's basically another form of premature optimization as it pertains to discovery and research. It stems from the misbegotten idea of permeating the last few decades that cost-benefits accounting and ROI should drive the entire world (and choosing the entirely wrong accounting model to apply uniformly on top of it).
chriskanan 8y ago
As a scientist, fund raising of grants is by far the worst part of the job. NSF rejects proposals with 3 "very good" scores as low competitive regularly. It isn't that they don't think the work is terrible. It's just limited resources.
phkahler 8y ago
>> And if you submit a proposal that says "I'm going to go off and work on this crazy idea, and maybe there's a one in a thousand chance that I'll discover some of the secrets of the universe, and a 99.9% chance that I'll come up with bubkes," you get turned down. That's just people being chicken. You know someone got to research why wombat poop comes out in cubes: https://gizmodo.com/we-finally-know-how-wombats-produce-their-distinctly-cu-1830414749 https://gizmodo.com/we-finally-know-how-wombats-produce-thei... I could spend a couple hours giving physicists off-the-wall ideas that have some degree of plausibility. All worth exploring rigorously IMHO.
anonymousDan 8y ago
One slightly cynical strategy I've heard is that your next grant proposal should be for the work you've already completed, giving you time to come up with the idea for the one after :)
- rivp931 8y ago
  Not really workable in practice. Are you going to lie in the project schedule section of the application? Nowadays the grant agencies expect to have Gantt charts and other crap. It also would require delaying publishing a work when it's finished, which then raises the chances of perishing... What people however do is to smuggle more risky ideas into proposals for less risky ones. But that in the end means they'll be spending time also on low-risk things.
  - solveit 8y ago
    Probably works in mathematics and other theoretical sciences. If the way you use your funding depends on the particulars of what you're doing, then you're probably screwed.
scythe 8y ago
>And if you submit a proposal that says "I'm going to go off and work on this crazy idea, and maybe there's a one in a thousand chance that I'll discover some of the secrets of the universe, and a 99.9% chance that I'll come up with bubkes," you get turned down. >But if a thousand really smart people did this, maybe we'd actually have a chance of making some progress. The problem is, as I understand it: suppose some people locked themselves in their attic and worked on physics problems; how does society know that they're actually working on physics and not merely twiddling their thumbs? The whole publication-review-credit-tenure-grant circuit was invented to address exactly that situation. In order to replace it, you need some other way of convincing the funding bodies that their money is actually paying for something.
baxtr 8y ago
So, maybe we need VC funding for science?
rthomas6 8y ago
I wonder if some rich people could start a form of charity where they just pay a few incredibly brilliant people a good salary to go do whatever research they want for the rest of their lives. Sort of like patronage. Just bypass the whole grant funding cycle and work on whatever you want, because you're a genius and want to study things other people don't like or understand.
- __jal 8y ago
  A different approach to attempting something similar (in a wider range): https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/podcasts/07172018/tyler-cowen-announces-emergent-ventures https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/podcasts/07172018/tyler-cowe... No idea how Cowen's thing will turn out, and I'm not sure the idea scales well, but I really like the concept.
- konschubert 8y ago
  The problem with education/science/welfare by charity is that it doesn't scale as well and isn't as stable as societal contracts. A developed country can be recognised by the fact that the society doesn't rely on the goodwill of the rich.
  - rthomas6 8y ago
    Surely both models can coexist? I don't think there should be any decrease in government science funding.
  - spicymaki 8y ago
    Another issue with relying on charity is that there is often strings attached to the money donated. We really want to allow students, scientists, engineers, etc. to have agency, not be under some wealthy person's patronage.
- rivp931 8y ago
  A first problem is how to recognize these incredibly brilliant people. The current answer to this is the tournament to tenured professorship. If you select those who already succeed in this system, you are not really doing anything new, so something different should be done but it is not clear what. A second difficulty is the "rest of their lives" part. It's quite hard to believe ROI would not be required when rich people are involved in some way or other. Charity is PR, and so the system will optimize for PR.
yters 8y ago
This is what I'm doing: https://www.am-nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/ https://www.am-nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/
joaorico 8y ago
I think John Bell discovered his revolutionary Bell's theorems of quantum mechanics in a similar way. I can't find it now in a quick search, but I remember reading that he thought every physicist should devote something like 10% of their time thinking about the foundations of physics/quantum mechanics. (What would he do with 100% of his time?)
adrianratnapala 8y ago
If this theory about the grant system is right, then we should expect to see philanthropy-funded research pull ahead. Philanthropists will vary in how much they tolerate long-shot ideas; but will generally not tolerate a recipient sitting around doing nothing -- and even if they do, it's their own money. The only question then is whether there is enough philanthropic research around. Are there perhaps, 2000 different projects around the world getting something like 5M USD each from an philanthropists? Or does the modern zeitgeist that assumes science funding is a thing for governments to do crowd it out?

gbumakefan 8y ago

Except you can’t just go hide in your attic. Everyone is more risk averse than ever as the cost of housing, healthcare, and education relentlessly increase faster than wages.

nixpulvis 8y ago
Reminds me a bit of the expression "desperate times call for desperate measures".
EGreg 8y ago
This is one of the best arguments for UBI. Imagine how much humanity would innovate in science, open source and other public gift economies if everyone didn’t have to worry how they will eat and pay rent next month.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  How about reducing the generally accepted working hours to something like 24 hrs/week? 40 is pretty arbitrary so we could arbitrarily set a lower number. That would free up a lot of creativity.
- pdonis 8y ago
  The argument you are making assumes two things that strike me as highly implausible: (1) That enough people would use their new free time to innovate instead of just watching TV or playing World of Warcraft or something like that. (2) That enough people would still choose to do the unpleasant but necessary tasks that provide the resources needed for everyone to eat, have housing, etc. Not to mention all the other stuff people seem to want.
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    Right now a fairly tight circle of people decide for others how to spend vast amounts of time. It's not even very efficient as many jobs carry bullshit hours requirements. So after increasing free time by a large amount, a very small number of people start choosing different areas to innovate in, it still ends up as a large growth area for innovation, or social interaction, or whatever humans value individually instead of what old line accounting values.
    - pdonis 8y ago
      I don't dispute that our current system is inefficient. But the proposed change under discussion (universal basic income) does not just mean "increasing free time by a large amount" while keeping everything else the same. It means increasing free time by a large amount while removing the need for anyone to do productive work. It's the latter that I see as problematic, not the former. What would a world where we did the former but not the latter look like? It would be something like everyone having to be, at least in some measure, an entrepreneur--everyone would be their own small business, having to figure out what product or service to sell to others in order to make a living, and having to decide for themselves what use of their time would best serve that goal. That might well, in the long run (i.e., after all the upheaval caused by people who were used to having someone else define their business objectives, now having to do it themselves, has died down), be a big improvement over what we have now. But the key incentive of having to make a living is still there.
syncsynchalt 8y ago
Human productivity is at its highest point in human history, so one can't help but wonder why we must all work harder than our ancestors to exist.
- fokov 8y ago
  Because they realized they were in this together, unionized, not just demanded but fought for more rights and a better life balance. Since the baby-boomers more women entered the work force and used their "extra" income to buy things. That lead to inflation of those assets - especially housing. Now people continue to push down labor rights so they make even less than before. I'm with you though, I find this to be extremely frustrating.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  It's almost as though much of that productivity on an individual level is not making it back to those individuals, and going somewhere else, perhaps to others.
- trophycase 8y ago
  And more economically useless work is done than ever before by an enormous margin (advertising, CGI, video games, cosmetics, PR, social media addiction, etc.). Just briefly think about how many people produce nothing of real value (i.e. value that would actually reduce housing, food, and medical costs) and how many are simply trying to redistribute the demand of the general population so they can get theirs. Basically, there are fewer economic "sources" than ever and more "sinks" than ever.
  - vorg 8y ago
    > many people produce nothing of real value (i.e. value that would actually reduce housing, food, and medical costs) Worse still, many people do work that exists for the purpose of raising housing, food, and medical costs.
- FabHK 8y ago
  Keynes famously predicted 88 years ago [1] that "the economic problem" would be solved 100 years thence (hence in 12 years), and assumed that people would only need to work 15 hours a week. But back then already he pointed out two issues: * what will people do with their free time? "It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing!" He asked whether there might be a "general 'nervous breakdown'" of people "who cannot find it sufficiently amusing [...] to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing." * While most of our needs would easily be fulfilled, he noted a second class of needs, jostling for relative status, that might never be: there are two classes, "needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they." And he got somewhat overly optimistic then maybe: "The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth – unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them." Seems to me the massive inequality and concomitant struggle for relative status keeps most everyone working like crazy, even though we have many times more than what people had a century ago. [1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/... EDIT to add: Keynes biographer Lord Skidelsky has a book about it, How much is enough?: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/29/how-much-is-enough-skidelsky-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/29/how-much-is-en...

TremendousJudge 8y ago

And Einstein didn't write his breakthrough papers while employed at a university either

maxxxxx 8y ago
He had an easy job at the patent office so he had time and energy to work on other things.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Aperson4321 8y ago
  And boredom and desperation. One thing is to have the rare talent and opportunity, another is to actually truly go for it. Most people lack the daring and rebelliousness to think that they can prove that all of humanity in all of history have misunderstood something truly fundamental.

fjuerfilis 8y ago

Sigh, so true. Heartening that Shor has the same thoughts about the grant system that I do. I don't have quite the same critical perspective as the blogger, but I think there's a certain misguided attitude underlying the phenomena observed by Shor. Yesterday or the day before I was listening to the radio and someone with a physics background was talking about something (I think quantum entanglement) and started asserting that physics has basically figured out almost everything. This is probably a somewhat unfair paraphrase, but not too unfair. What irritated me about it was the assumption that, if most of your predictions are correct, your model is almost entirely correct, and just needs to be tweaked a bit. This is certainly true some of the time, but sometimes those little empirical cracks are what brings down a major paradigm, and leads to another one, one that has the same predictions as in 99% of the cases, but in the other 1% has totally different predictions with very different implications. This carries over to grant funding, etc. in that the prevailing community often assumes that what they're doing is fine, and all that's left are these little empirical tweaks. That's certainly helpful some of the time, but it seems to dominate too much. Academics needs to leave more room for people to fail at high rates with good ideas, to increase those small percent of times they succeed wildly.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> What irritated me about it was the assumption that, if most of your predictions are correct, your model is almost entirely correct, and just needs to be tweaked a bit. Haha, no. We wish. Epicycles worked very well and were highly accurate, because, as Fourier analysis later showed, any smooth curve can be approximated to arbitrary accuracy with a sufficient number of epicycles. However, they fell out of favour with the discovery that planetary motions were largely elliptical from a heliocentric frame of reference, which led to the discovery that gravity obeying a simple inverse square law could better explain all planetary motions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle A theory can explain observations even perfectly well and still be wrong- because the frame of reference is wrong. The worse thing is that you can't figure that out until you've figured out what the correct frame of reference is, and looked at your obsrevations in a new light.
- 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dv_dt 8y ago

It's basically another form of premature optimization as it pertains to discovery and research. It stems from the misbegotten idea of permeating the last few decades that cost-benefits accounting and ROI should drive the entire world (and choosing the entirely wrong accounting model to apply uniformly on top of it).

chriskanan 8y ago

As a scientist, fund raising of grants is by far the worst part of the job. NSF rejects proposals with 3 "very good" scores as low competitive regularly. It isn't that they don't think the work is terrible. It's just limited resources.

phkahler 8y ago

>> And if you submit a proposal that says "I'm going to go off and work on this crazy idea, and maybe there's a one in a thousand chance that I'll discover some of the secrets of the universe, and a 99.9% chance that I'll come up with bubkes," you get turned down. That's just people being chicken. You know someone got to research why wombat poop comes out in cubes: https://gizmodo.com/we-finally-know-how-wombats-produce-their-distinctly-cu-1830414749 https://gizmodo.com/we-finally-know-how-wombats-produce-thei... I could spend a couple hours giving physicists off-the-wall ideas that have some degree of plausibility. All worth exploring rigorously IMHO.

anonymousDan 8y ago

One slightly cynical strategy I've heard is that your next grant proposal should be for the work you've already completed, giving you time to come up with the idea for the one after :)

rivp931 8y ago
Not really workable in practice. Are you going to lie in the project schedule section of the application? Nowadays the grant agencies expect to have Gantt charts and other crap. It also would require delaying publishing a work when it's finished, which then raises the chances of perishing... What people however do is to smuggle more risky ideas into proposals for less risky ones. But that in the end means they'll be spending time also on low-risk things.
- solveit 8y ago
  Probably works in mathematics and other theoretical sciences. If the way you use your funding depends on the particulars of what you're doing, then you're probably screwed.

scythe 8y ago

>And if you submit a proposal that says "I'm going to go off and work on this crazy idea, and maybe there's a one in a thousand chance that I'll discover some of the secrets of the universe, and a 99.9% chance that I'll come up with bubkes," you get turned down. >But if a thousand really smart people did this, maybe we'd actually have a chance of making some progress. The problem is, as I understand it: suppose some people locked themselves in their attic and worked on physics problems; how does society know that they're actually working on physics and not merely twiddling their thumbs? The whole publication-review-credit-tenure-grant circuit was invented to address exactly that situation. In order to replace it, you need some other way of convincing the funding bodies that their money is actually paying for something.

baxtr 8y ago

So, maybe we need VC funding for science?

rthomas6 8y ago

I wonder if some rich people could start a form of charity where they just pay a few incredibly brilliant people a good salary to go do whatever research they want for the rest of their lives. Sort of like patronage. Just bypass the whole grant funding cycle and work on whatever you want, because you're a genius and want to study things other people don't like or understand.

__jal 8y ago
A different approach to attempting something similar (in a wider range): https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/podcasts/07172018/tyler-cowen-announces-emergent-ventures https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/podcasts/07172018/tyler-cowe... No idea how Cowen's thing will turn out, and I'm not sure the idea scales well, but I really like the concept.
konschubert 8y ago
The problem with education/science/welfare by charity is that it doesn't scale as well and isn't as stable as societal contracts. A developed country can be recognised by the fact that the society doesn't rely on the goodwill of the rich.
- rthomas6 8y ago
  Surely both models can coexist? I don't think there should be any decrease in government science funding.
- spicymaki 8y ago
  Another issue with relying on charity is that there is often strings attached to the money donated. We really want to allow students, scientists, engineers, etc. to have agency, not be under some wealthy person's patronage.
rivp931 8y ago
A first problem is how to recognize these incredibly brilliant people. The current answer to this is the tournament to tenured professorship. If you select those who already succeed in this system, you are not really doing anything new, so something different should be done but it is not clear what. A second difficulty is the "rest of their lives" part. It's quite hard to believe ROI would not be required when rich people are involved in some way or other. Charity is PR, and so the system will optimize for PR.

yters 8y ago

This is what I'm doing: https://www.am-nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/ https://www.am-nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/

joaorico 8y ago

I think John Bell discovered his revolutionary Bell's theorems of quantum mechanics in a similar way. I can't find it now in a quick search, but I remember reading that he thought every physicist should devote something like 10% of their time thinking about the foundations of physics/quantum mechanics. (What would he do with 100% of his time?)

adrianratnapala 8y ago

If this theory about the grant system is right, then we should expect to see philanthropy-funded research pull ahead. Philanthropists will vary in how much they tolerate long-shot ideas; but will generally not tolerate a recipient sitting around doing nothing -- and even if they do, it's their own money. The only question then is whether there is enough philanthropic research around. Are there perhaps, 2000 different projects around the world getting something like 5M USD each from an philanthropists? Or does the modern zeitgeist that assumes science funding is a thing for governments to do crowd it out?